Total War: Rome 2 patch 7 now in open beta for players to try(arii)

14 Nov 2013 by Peter Parrish

Brian Blessed still hasn’t been patched in, for some reason.

Creative Assembly has announced today that Patch 7 for Total War: Rome II is available as an opt-in beta on Steam. This is the method the team has been using since launch, where the patch will be in beta for a while for players to (optionally) download, then move into general release a week or so later.

As always, to opt in to the beta patch you need to right-click on Rome 2 in your Steam games list. Then navigate to “properties,” find the “betas” tab and select Patch 7 from the drop-down menu in there. After that, wait, and Steam will grab the beta for you.

Once again, there’s a pretty fat list of fixes accompanying this update (replicated below.) More performance improvements, superior battle AI … hey, if you’re a Rome 2 player you know the kind of stuff that needed to still be worked on. It’s that kind of thing.

The objectives panel will show placeholder text for Ultimate Objectives and Chapter Objectives after opening another UI panel (e.g. selecting a unit, clicking Trade etc.)

Global

Performance – Unit rendering performance on high spec gpu’s has been optimised, resulting in higher frame rates on EXTREME settings in most scenarios.

Extensive Frontend-UI tweaks and optimisations.

Battle AI improvements

Attacking siege AI now uses battering rams more frequently.

Attacking siege AI can now use all units to burn gates, and should not become inactive if it has only non-infantry units remaining.

Attacking AI is now more conservative with the use of its general when assaulting walls and gates, but can still use the general unit as a last resort.

Added safeguards against some rare issues which could cause the attacking settlement AI to become idle.

Fixed an issue in settlement AI which could result in units losing their attack orders, causing units to sometimes run past enemy units they were trying to attack, as well as causing defending missile units on walls to halt their firing orders.

Improved AI’s use of Use The Whip and Rapid Advance.

AI now targets war-dogs rather than their handlers after dogs have been released.

Eliminated unnecessary reforms in AI’s defence-line tactics.

Improved AI scouting behaviour.

Unit rebalancing

Increased damage for club weapons.

Increased melee defence for pike units.

Rebalance of all small-arm projectile damage:

Javelins have received a boost to their armour penetration damage.
All horse archers (incl. Royal Horse Archers) now have Heavy Shot.
Some elite foot archers now also have access to Heavy Shot.
Different types of bows now have different ranges.
All bows now have some armour penetration.

Rebalanced the following units:

Naked warriors
Ambushers
Berserkers
Painted ones
Naked swords

Some missile infantry shields have had their missile block chance increased.

Tower projectile incendiary damage has been reduced.

Burning oil incendiary damage has been reduced.

Improved arrow tower damage has been reduced, and is now mostly normal damage instead of armour penetration.

Scorpion tower projectiles now have a smaller cone of effect.

Reduced incendiary hit points on all siege vehicles apart from burning rams which have both incendiary and normal hit points increased.

Fixed issue in battle combat rules which failed to give the commanding general additional saving throws, making generals unusually vulnerable in harder difficulty modes. These saving throws have also been extended to non-commanding generals, making all general characters harder to kill in battles.